Programs at Boys and Girls Club in West Kelowna disrupted just as school is about to resume

Vandalism and heavy snow has forced the partial closure of the Webber Road building used by the Okanagan Boys and Girls Clubs of the Okanagan.

Damage to vents led to flooding that’s affected about 30 per cent of the building so drop-in programs have been cancelled for the rest of January, but regular programs will continue, Jeremy Welder, the club’s director of operations told iNFOnews.ca today, Jan. 3.

“We’re just trying to work with the restoration company right now to figure out what exactly will be needed to bring the facility back up to where we will be able to fully use it,” he said. “We are having to cancel, for January, some of our drop-in programs so we can consolidate programs and make sure we can deliver on our child care programs, both day care and after school care, to ensure parents don’t have hardships as far at the programs they are utilizing so they can get to work and stuff like that.”

The restoration company is currently evaluating the condition of the damaged building and checking to see if there are things like asbestos or vermiculite that need to be dealt with. As far as Welder knows, that will not affect the operation of the rest of the building.

There are about 80 children attending the regular programs but a much smaller number go to the drop-in sessions, Welder said.


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Rob Munro

Rob Munro has a long history in journalism after starting an underground newspaper in Whitehorse called the Yukon Howl in 1980. He spent five years at the 100 Mile Free Press, starting in the darkroom, moving on to sports and news reporting before becoming the advertising manager. He came to Kelowna in 1989 as a reporter for the Kelowna Daily Courier, and spent the 1990s mostly covering city hall. For most of the past 20 years he worked full time for the union representing newspaper workers throughout B.C. He’s returned to his true love of being a reporter with a special focus on civic politics

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